That Old Ace in the Hole, by Annie Proulx

Tall stories meet big winds and dark secrets in Annie Proulx's Texas. Graham Caveney whoops with delight

For its writers and artists, the American wilderness is closer to a religious aesthetic than it is to the pragmatics of geography. In its sprawling potential, lethal grandeur, and sublime indifference can be found the very signature of God: a transcendental affirmation of national myth and personal theology.

Nowhere does this legacy continue to resonate more than in the vast landscapes of Texas, a state that could be said to be the main character of Annie Proulx's astonishing new novel.

Our introduction to it is through the aptly named Bob Dollar, a property scout for the Global Pork Rind company, whose job it is to identify possible locations for their hog farms. Never mind that the stench will make the neighbourhood uninhabitable, or that their chemicals induce all manner of illness: his Denver-based employers are intent on expansion into the Lone Star's panhandle. In many ways, the plot evokes the 19th-century narratives of corrupt railroads and small-town resistance, a motif that the critic Leo Marx famously identified as "the Machine in the Garden".

But this is Texas, and this is Proulx. Any simplistic opposition between corporate villainy and quaint community is soon dissolved into a subtle unfolding of a conflicted heritage, a study of how the state's inhabitants come together in order to remain alone. Local hostility to the franchise forces Bob to go undercover, with him posing first as a magazine journalist and then as a retirement home developer, before settling in a town called Woolybucket.

It is here that he encounters the cast of characters whose overlapping tales form the basis of the book. There is the eponymous Ace Crouch, a retired windmill repairman, Cy Frease, chef at the local Old Dog Cafe, and Bob's landlady, LaVon Fronk, a local historian who weaves their threads together. On creaking back porches, over gut-busting fried food, he listens as stories drip from his hosts' mouths like chicken grease. We get the discovery and demise of the oil wells; the rumours of the sheriff's "special relationship" with his spinster sister; the barbed-wire feud between a local cowboy and an Oklahoma rancher; and an unsettling defence of the Ku Klux Klan and how they kept the region – quite literally – alive throughout the Great Depression.

Proulx manages to skirt around the edges of cliché while reassembling its ingredients. Yes, she gives us rednecks, liberals, white trash and pious Protestants. The point is that, at times, we get them all within the brea(d)th of a single character.

The novel relishes its own fault-lines: the proximity of rustic innocence to shotgun justice, of family values and incest, the claustrophobia of a community agoraphobically trapped within the overwhelming space of the Union's second largest state. And, of course, there is the weather, moving from idyllic tranquillity to apocalyptic wrath, drought to tornadoes that come straight from the Old Testament: "The hailstones were bigger now, and it seemed a dozen roofers with nail guns were attacking the Saturn. All at once the windshield cracked and crazed in a dozen places ... No wonder, he thought, that panhandle people were a godly lot, for they lived in sudden, violent atmospheres. Weather kept them humble."

The longer Bob stays, the more reluctant he is to do his job, but Proulx sidesteps expectations of a city-slicker conversion. We reflect on what Bob is rejecting as well as what he is embracing, and therein lies an erotic subtext that would be churlish to reveal. Inevitably, he stays, but the ambiguities that lie ahead prove Tolstoy's maxim that great art does not end; it merely stops at interesting places.

The research has clearly been painstaking, containing an acknowledgements page that verges on self-parody ("C E Williams of Panhandle Ground Water Conservation District No 3 ... made useful comments on the agricultural use of the Ogalla aquifer"). In lesser hands, this book could have laboured beneath footnotes; but Proulx lends them such anecdotal ease that they become inseparable from the protagonists. She takes caricature and transforms it into chiaroscuro ("light" reading at its shadowy best), blends archetype with stereotype so that neither term quite fits, and juxtaposes simple story-telling with complex collage.

This book's intellectual heritage may well include Emerson's essay on nature and, stylistically, she is indebted to the Nebraska novels of Willa Cather. That said, Annie Proulx's voice remains uniquely her own – her vision as distinctively seductive as a Texan sunset.